turbo's questions

On my Vostro 1000 notebook the following messages spam my dmesg:

[18678.728936] atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x8d on isa0060/serio0).
[18678.728941] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00d <keycode>' to make it known.
[18679.831109] atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x8d on isa0060/serio0).
[18679.831119] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00d <keycode>' to make it known.
[18679.841607] atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x8d on isa0060/serio0).
[18679.841615] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00d <keycode>' to make it known.
[18680.901733] atkbd.c: Unknown key pressed (translated set 2, code 0x8d on isa0060/serio0).
[18680.901744] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00d <keycode>' to make it known.
[18680.911536] atkbd.c: Unknown key released (translated set 2, code 0x8d on isa0060/serio0).
[18680.911546] atkbd.c: Use 'setkeycodes e00d <keycode>' to make it known.

It's most probably not from an actual key because it appears in regular intervals. First what is it? It could be my battery since it's nearly dead, as in loadable to 11 % of the initial capacity, but I have no evidence for that.

• What is this / how can I find out where this comes from?
• How can I get rid of it? Is there a 'dud' keycode?

When I assign a keycode with sudo setkeycode e00d $(random keycode) the key does actually get pressed. That makes it impossible to enter sudo password for example. So any 'real' keycode is not an option.

It hasn't been like that half a year ago. Even better than the dud keycode would be a real fix. It happens from 10.04 to 12.04 (before that I don't know).

I did read zcat /usr/share/doc/udev/README.keymap.txt.gz |less as suggested in the Ubuntu Wiki. /lib/udev/findkeyboards && sudo /lib/udev/keymap -i input/event5 produces what appears to be newlines in rapid succession.

sudo udevadm monitor doesn't show the event.

EDIT I kinda answered my question with the help of this. The only question remaining is how to make the changes permanently stay in the pack-file and not be lost on reprofile. I'll leave the question open in case someone knows of a way (I'll accept that as an answer then). /EDIT

I use my PC in a very similar fashion after boot: I'm using evince, chromium-browser, gmpc and gpodder most of the time. Now I want to cache those programs (at the expense of boot time if needed) using ureadahead.

Now I looked at the contents of the ureadahead pack like this sudo ureadahead --dump|grep chromium and found only icons, .dekstop files and gconf key to be cached*.

So I was wondering whether there's a way to make ureadahead cache the binaries and libraries of my most commonly used programs as well and make them open in a snap after boot.

*As far as I understood ureadahead doesn't really cache but rather keep a list of files and sorts them by inodes thus optimizing the access pattern but well...

In /dev I have 12 or so devices named ram0 ram1 etc. What are those? What can they be used for?

EDIT: In precise there's now zram-config. It's an upstart job compressing up to half of your ram spread over $(number of CPU cores) swap devices. It didn't allways start at boot but issuing sudo service zram-config start works.

I enabled compcache="256 M" in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf as described here (by me :P). This - I believe - creates /dev/ramzswap0 but it is never enabled as swap. It works only after mkswap && swapon.

Then there is the module zram that creates /dev/zram. Is it something else? It works the same way but /dev/ramzswap is created from the module ramzswap.

At the end of the day I wanna have a compressed swap in ram and use the better of the two and for that I need to know how to enable it permanently in a non hackish way. How is this done?

I wrote about ramzswap in Lucid here but things have changed in Natty. You can still enable ramzswap in initramfs.conf but it doesn't get activated.

P.S.:I scanned all udev rules in /lib and/etc but found nothing of interest.

My idea was that (using loopback devices) it works like this

1. Create the raid array sudo mkfs.btrfs -m raid1 -d raid1 /dev/loop1 /dev/loop2
2. You mount them sudo mount /dev/loop1 /mnt and mark them touch goodcondition
3. You unmount and simulate disk failure (remove disk or delete loopback device loop2 in my case)
4. You mount degraded -o degraded and mark again touch degraded
5. You add the bad disk again sudo btrfs dev add /dev/loop2
6. You rebalance sudo btrfs fi ba /mnt

And Raid 1 should work again. But that's not the case. sudo btrfs fi show:

Total devices 3 FS bytes used 28.00KB
devid    3 size 4.00GB used 264.00MB path /dev/loop1
devid    2 size 4.00GB used 272.00MB path /dev/loop2
*** Some devices missing

The file degraded lives on loop1 but not on loop2 when loop2 is mounted in degraded mode. Why is that?

And likewise Ctrl+Left to prevword. I read the man page of nanorc and found

bind key function menu

So the line bind ^Left prevword main would be what I want, the problem is that nano only accepts

an alpha character or the word "Space"

so Left doesn't exist.

Is there a way to accomplish this? Right now I'm on natty (nano 2.2.2) but I will upgrade nano if a later (devel?) version can do this.

Since I don't use my laptop's CD-drive I want to put a small (8 GB) SSD into the CD-drive slot (I'll use a caddy similar to this one). I want to use compressed btrfs on the SSD and put all the data on the big HDD.

Is it viable to do a RAID 1 with SSD and a same-size partition of the HDD?

Maybe even remount the RAID -o degraded after boot and spin down the HDD :-) ?

Since I don't use my laptop's CD-drive I want to put a small (8 GB) SSD into the CD-drive slot (I'll use a caddy similar to this one). I want to use compressed btrfs on the SSD and put all the data on the big HDD. I want to avoid unnecessary spin-ups. I want the system to be fast... I want to minimize wearing of the SSD.

What tricks are there to use a compressed ramdisk wisely (using but not overusing it)? How to enable it? What values are sensible?

Also see this post (I split my questions up).

Since I don't use my laptop's CD-drive I want to put a small (8 GB) SSD into the CD-drive slot (I'll use a caddy similar to this one). I want to use compressed btrfs on the SSD and put all the data on the big HDD. I want to avoid unnecessary spin-ups. I want the system to be fast... I want to minimize wearing of the SSD.

How should I layout the mount points of my file-system? How can I prevent the HDD to spin up at the same time?

I do have a working VPN connection. Now I want this VPN connection to automatically activate when I'm in a certain wireless network. Is there a non-intrusive graphical way using network-manager-applet? If I remember correctly it worked for a while and doesn't anymore.

I made the wireless-connection in question available for all users for not having to input the password every time.

The CLI program used is vpnc with Hybrid-Auth enabled (cisco VPN-client compatible) from sroecker's PPA

EDIT: I can' try the answers anymore (because of eduroam) and since no answer seems to gain a majority of votes I'm just gonna leave it unanswered for now until one is upvoted then I'm gonna accept that.

This list is now more or less superceded by https://extensions.gnome.org/ where extensions can be one click installed and configured.

There are several addons for gnome-shell. Please help me compile a list of existiong addons

I have answered my question by adding the extensions I know of as answers. Since there are many extensions each single answers is still a stub.

Here's a video of some of the extensions in action:

Most of the time I use chroot to rescue an existing installation from usb.

When I chroot into another system I have to manually bind-mount proc, sys, dev and dev/pts by issuing for example:

mount --bind /proc proc/

Is there an easy way already implemented in a standard Ubuntu install?

I want my screen to flash red so that it looks similar to getting hit by a rocket in Doom II, preferably using cli tools. I've seen that redshift does something similar just way too slow so I tried using xrandr but couldn't figure out how to do what I want properly. Can xrandr (cli) do this and if so, how?

Also I'm using compiz. Maybe there is a way to do it with compiz using dbus-send?